How the new AI chip rule from the US will work

Jan 13 (Reuters) - The U.S. government said on Monday it would issue a new regulation designed to control access to U.S.-designed artificial intelligence chips and technology by other countries around the world.

The rule regulates the flow of American AI chips and technology needed for the most sophisticated AI applications.

Here are more details on the U.S. action:

The rule restricts the export of chips known as graphics processing units (GPUs), specialized processors originally created to accelerate graphics rendering.

Although known for their role in gaming, the ability of GPUs such as those made by U.S.-based industry leader Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab to process different pieces of data simultaneously has made them valuable for training and running AI models.

OpenAI's ChatGPT, for example, is trained and improved on tens of thousands of GPUs.

The number of GPUs needed for an AI model depends on how advanced the GPU is, how much data is being used to train the model, the size of the model itself and the time the developer wants to spend training it.

To control global access to AI, the U.S. is expanding restrictions on advanced GPUs needed to build the clusters used to train advanced AI models.

The limits on GPUs for most countries in the new rule are set by compute power, to account for differences in individual chips.

Total processing performance (TPP) is a metric used to measure the computational power of a chip. Under the regulation, countries with caps on compute power are restricted to a total of 790 million TPP through 2027.

The cap translates into the equivalent of nearly 50,000 H100 Nvidia GPUs, according to Divyan...
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